MovieChat Forums > Cape Fear (1962) Discussion > Until he rots? (Spoilers)

Until he rots? (Spoilers)

posted 12 years ago by hobnob53
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SPOILERS!

At the end, when Sam wounds Cady and is holding him at gunpoint, he tells him they're going to nurse Cady back to health so he can go back to prison, this time for life. Cady reacts in helpless rage, as Sam tells him he's going to spend the rest of his life in a cage, counting the years, days, hours, "until the day you rot." Of course, the last thing Cady wanted was to go back to prison -- which is why he asks Sam to shoot him after finally being caught.

But Sam -- and the movie -- forget something crucial: Cady killed the cop assigned to protect Sam's family at the houseboat. He grabbed, choked and drowned him before setting forth to assualt Nancy.

Therefore, Cady wouldn't have gone to prison for life. He would have been tried for first-degree murder, certainly been convicted, and (especially in the South in 1962, but even today) been sentenced to death for the crime. In short, Max Cady wouldn't have spent too much time in prison -- probably only a few years at most. He would surely have been executed for killing the officer. Not that he would likely have found that fate preferable to life, but that's where he was heading.

It surprises me (and this is one of the film's few weaknesses) that Cady's killing of the cop received no further mention after he did it, especially in connection with the sentence he'd be facing for that act.

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[–] ecarle 12 years ago

Well stated.

The cop's death isn't mentioned, but it is a long and terrifying scene and Peck certainly finds the body.

So I figure once Peck guarantees Mitchum "he'll rot," it is because now Mitchum has FINALLY been caught red-handed committing the worst crime of all.

Yeah, in the South, they'd probably fry him. But this is a Hays Code movie out of an already fairly liberal Hollywood, with a liberal star(Peck) in the lead and as producer (Peck was already preparing for his saintly role in "To Kill a Mockingbird," I think -- ANOTHER movie where he's a good lawyer and his family is menaced by a psycho). Moreover, "Cape Fear" was a movie that practically strained itself trying to make the case for "the right and might of the law."

So we have to figure that Peck wasn't going to say:

"They're gonna put you in the chair and fry you til you sizzle like bacon!"

No, better just to talk about a life "rotting in a cell."

Gee, in a later era they'd just be setting up:

"Cape Fear, Part Two: Cady Breaks Out And This Time He's Really Mad!"

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[–] telegonus 12 years ago

One thing we may be missing, hobnob, is the nature of the law as written and practiced in different states. There may have been laws in Georgia that would have enabled Bowden, the local police chief, mayor, county commissioner, someone, to intervene and change the death sentence to life imprisonment even as one might expect the former to have been at the time nearly inevitable. In some states yes and in other states no. Or just maybe.

It would take a scholar, an expert in state and especially Georgia law to address the issue here. Maybe it's in the novel. A loophole, I mean. In other words, Sam Bowden knew the law, wasn't just tormenting Cady at gunpoint with his "till you rot" rant, he may well have been thinking of just how to finesse this once Cady was in custody, especially if they could get Cady charged as insane (if that's possible ) or get someone to defend him as such, even if Cady refuses. That would guarantee that Cady would indeed rot: in the Georgia State Prison For the Criminally Insane.

There's a nifty Catch 22 here in Bowden's favor. If Cady refuses to plead the insanity defense that would prove that he was insane given what he had just done to Bowden, his wife and daughter and the cop he drowned in the river. In other words, a lose/lose for Cady. He is going to rot.

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[–] ecarle 12 years ago

This analysis is interesting to me in light of three Hitchcock-related scenes I have just recently viewed.

ONE: "Rope" is finally in that heavy rotation on the Encore movie networks along with Psycho, Rear Window, Vertigo, The Birds and the rest. And at the end of that one, James Stewart roars in Stewartian rage to the killers Brandon and Philip:

"I know what's gonna happen to you, Brandon. You're gonna DIE! And you too Philip!"

So in 1948, there was none of this "you'll rot" nonsense. Heh.

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TWO: A quite provocative Hitchcock episode with Inger Stevens has her stuck alone at her Malibu beach house and guilt-ridden that a Latino's wife has been beaten and died(at the hospital) after Inger didn't let the man in to call for gas for his stranded car. The Latino man left his wife in the car, walked for gas...and she was attacked.

The tensions of wealthy whites and the Latino man are explored rather fully for a 1963 show. At the episode's end, the villains are revealed as a trio of fresh-faced surfer guys (well one is Richard Jaekel, oddly overage for his role) who are "group psychos"(rather like the two young killers in "Scream") and Inger is only saved from rape and murder by...the Latino man! He holds a gun on one of the young surfer villains, elects not to shoot him as requested(as Cady does of Bowden), and gives him the "rot" speech except its about dying in the gas chamber..

"I will let you wait for the big wave."

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THREE: Another Hitchcock episode has Barry Sullivan trying to confess that he killed his wife by throwing her off their boat. A prominent guest on the boat -- a judge -- says he witnessed the whole thing and Sullivan never came near his wife. The cops believe the judge. Sullivan is committed to a mental institution.

Turns out the judge planned it. He was the wife's lover, saw Sullivan kill her, wants Sullivan to "rot."

THAT plot sounds like your Bowden analysis, telegonus, sir.

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Insanity is indeed a Catch 22 in many states, even today. A killer will be committed to an institution, then, if found "cured" ...shipped over to prison.Sometimes(in some states) for execution.

The whole analysis of "criminal insanity" is a tricky game. Norman Bates. Max Cady. Who's "crazier"? Who is "more evil"? Who is more "sadistic and depraved"? Court shrinks make these calls all the time. And "Nice Norman's" murders were horrific and painful to the victims.

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I do think it is crucial to the original "Cape Fear" that Max Cady kills the cop. Did he "lose it" --- or did he figure that his plan would HAVE to involve murder at the end? Maybe murder of Bowden, or the wife, or the daughter, or all of them. But before he could do any of that, Cady realized he had to kill the cop to get to Bowden's family. And he was willing to. And that ended his "legal immunity."

I figure Cady's plan was to kill whoever he needed to(the cop, Bowden), rape the women(maybe kill them too), and then...disappear from town, never to be seen again.

But Bowden turned the tables.







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[–] telegonus 12 years ago

Yes, Jimmy Stewart's character made no bones about where he stood where the two young killers were concerned in Rope .

As was so often the case with Stewart in films, increasingly as time went on, he was full of rage, guilt, ambivilence and loathing, to varying degrees, depending on the situation. There's no doubt where he stands in his first Hitchcock film. Yet two years later he was as serene as could be as Elwood P. Dowd in Harvey, and the cupola of the Dowd house, as we both knoew, was (fittingly?) used for the Bates house on the hill ten years later.

Yet in Anatomy Of a Murder, Stewart seems well at ease and very folksy, fishing up in Michigan, living all by himself, sort of like Norman Bates with no issues and a law degrees. He's shrewd and unflappable in his professional conduct, seems to know what he's doing at all times. I think of the TV Perry Mason, in which Perry is often admonished by the judge for "going on a fishing expedition". In Anatomy Of a Murder Stewart's lawyer does just that, and then some. In the end he doesn't get paid for his efforts, a not ironic conclusion to the film given the nature of the man he was defending and his wife.

One can see in these later Stewart films why he was such a superstar and why Fonda was not. Picture Fonda in Rope. Maybe, but would he have had Stewart's "moral passion". Or in Harvey. No whimsy, no "otherworldly" qualities, which Stewart, oddly, had, and which Fonda, equally inner directed, didn't have. Fonda would likely have played the lawyer in Anatomy Of a Murder with the low key moral fervor he brought to his juror character in 12 Angry Men, but would there be the laughs, the funny stuff, with Eve Arden, the judge, George C. Scott's hotshot prosecutor? I doubt it.

Yes, the Inger Stevens episode, Forecast: Low Clouds and Coastal Fog was one of the best if not the best of the more dramatic entries in the hour long Hitchcock series. Stevens was superb,--and what a Hitchcoch gal she might have been!--and the supporting players were all well cast. The "noose tightening" in the second half, when it looks like Stevens may be the potential victim of a total stranger, then Dan O'Herlihy's heavy drinking, seemingly potentially unstable writer turns up, then the Hispanic guy whose wife had just died, with the X factor,--who's really going after Stevens?--left open, creates nearly unbearable tension, more so for Miss Stevens' extremely sympathetic playing of the lead. I had eliminated O'Herlihy and the enraged Hispanic guy as too obvious; red herrings, in other words. The clean-cut beach boys seemed the best bet, and I was right.

Okay, now to bring this back to Cape Fear and the insanity of killers, I think that this is often the case in films that are thrillers, the ones that end with a murder. Hitchcock often emphasized the mental unbalance or eccentricities of his murderers, with Rear Window's Lars Thorwald sticking out like a sore thumb, as he comes across as less insane than forlorn, a man at the end of his rope (pun intended), and as such more to be pitied as loathed, and this is emphasized, even when we can't even see him, just listening to him from behind the door as he speaks about having no money. In Cape Fear there's not an ounce of synpathy for Max Cady,--well, maybe an ounce, when he talks about how his wife left him, but then he goes and spoils it by telling us what he did to her afterward--so he's just a monster, Lucifer dressed up as a human being.

The Catch 22 is that just because he's that monstrous, doesn't this also suggest that he must be crazy? He never really acts crazy in the movie, once one accepts who he is and what he's up to his behavior, unlike that of Norman Bates, isn't peculiar. Cady has a one track man, and he's stalking Bowden and especially his wife and daughter like a lion. Still, even after drowning the cop, I think that Bowden might have a case for getting Cady put away for life as criminally insane. As you pointed out, EC, these matters differ by state, and one can help but think that the Georgia of 1962 would have been stricter, less flexible, than most states further north or west. On the other hand, Bowden was a "leading citizen", surely had friends in high places, so he might have finessed Cady's life sentence, with or without insanity as an issue. It would probably been crueller and more just to send him to an instituion for the criminally insane rather than one for the sane, as this would have been the supreme insult to Cady's ego. With the criminally sane he'd be, in his mind, at least "among equals", while if surrounded by madmen he'd be in with the loonies, which would make every day living hell, due as much to be associated with his social "inferiors" as to the lock-up itself.

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[–] hobnob53 12 years ago

You guys have been having a very interesting discussion, raising many worthwhile points and citing some good movies (plus the Hitchcock hour) for comparison. I'll just keep focused on Cape Fear for the moment.

I doubt very much that Bowden would make any effort to have Cady declared "insane" (a legal, not medical, term) in order to make sure he "rotted" in prison.

For one thing, I don't believe he has a vested interest in trying to keep Cady alive. We don't know whether Sam is anti-capital punishment, but remember that in 1962 the death penalty was still a common, and commonly accepted, sentence, here and in Europe, so no one would have thought much about it, from a moral point of view. As a southern lawyer in a southern town, Bowden might have had a more humane streak than many of his compatriots, but under the circumstances I doubt he'd have tried to intervene with a phony insanity declaration -- Cady was clearly not insane -- just for the sadistic satisfaction of seeing him rot in jail forever. Once he calmed down a bit, he'd likely have let the law take its course, which, because of the murder of the cop, would have led to Cady's execution.

There was absolutely no question that in 1962 a cop killer would have been sentenced to death, not only in Georgia but in most of the country. In all likelihood, the sentence would have been carried out within two or three years, not the 12 or 18 or even more that is the norm today in death-penalty states. Bowden, away from the heat of the crisis, would have been content to let the law take its course. Ultimately, I'm sure he would have been more concerned with true justice than revenge, with the added bonus that in receiving the death penalty, it'd be sure that Cady would never get out to harass Bowden ever again.

But overriding any debate about what Bowden might or might not want to see happen to Cady is one salient fact: Bowden would have had absolutely no say whatsoever in the charges to be brought against Cady for the murder of the cop, let alone the penalty to be imposed. The killing of the policeman is a criminal offense which doesn't involve Bowden and about which he has no say, as to the charges brought, the plea entered, the defense presented (assuming he was not the defense attorney, which seems obvious), or the sentence imposed. Only the state can determine what charges to bring and what penalty it will seek. Further, since Sam has no standing in this case, he could not feasibly affect the defense, including a determination of insanity. If anything, his "relationship" with Cady would be cause for any court to bar him from any involvement in Cady's murder trial. Further, Cady, whatever his emotional issues and personality disorders, was obviously not legally insane, and it's not conceivable that any doctor would find him so. In any event, the state would challenge any such diagnosis, probably successfully, as there are no indications of insanity in Cady.

All this aside, any jury would likely disbelieve an insanity claim and convict Cady of first-degree murder, simply because of the heinous nature of the crime, not to mention Cady's evil, unrepentant persona.

I never saw that Hitchcock TV episode you two talked about. Sounds good, and I'll try to keep an eye out for it on cable.

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[–] telegonus 12 years ago

You convinced me, Hobnob. Bowden would not have intervened for professional reasons; and besides, there was enough evidence against Cady without Bowden trying to pull strings behind the scenes. Bowden strikes me as too ethical anyway, though he did get the local police to give Cady a hard time and he hired those thugs, but one can excuse those actions as his being under pressure.

Also, the cooling off period would surely have allowed Bowden to have calmed down and think more clearly: Cady and his crimes were in the hands of the law, of a much larger authority than any Bowden would likely have had access to even if he'd wanted to put in a "good word" (or three: "let him rot"). That would make for a good movie scene but isn't like real life, and of course we've already had that scene at the end of the movie.

True about Cady's innate sanity. He's a cunning psychopath but he shows no signs of psychosis, or psychosis as I understand it. A nasty piece of work, I suppose he fits many diagnostic categories but not the Big One, the one that might have got him life instead of the electric chair.

The cop killing, which I see as a serious flaw in the film (I'd rather just knocked the guy out, silenced him in a way that would allow him to live), as without the murder charge Cady's actions would not have put him in the chair, which raises the issue of whether he could, like Freddy and Jason, stike again. With the cop dead there's little doubt that Cady would face a death sentence.

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[–] hobnob53 12 years ago

I liked your title above, telegonus -- "I'm convinced." That's the line E.G. Marshall says to Henry Fonda in 12 Angry Men, after the issue of the woman's eyesight is brought in as raising reasonable doubt. Brief as it is, that line always loomed large, and memorably, to me.

I think we're all agreed that killing the cop is a major plot flaw in the film, but at first it wasn't clear to me that Cady had killed him. Initially it looks as though he's simply choking him to render him unconscious, not actually kill him. Only after he's finished, and shoves him off into the water (and utters that line about, "You're gonna die without a mark on you"), is it clear what he's doing. He'd have been better off knocking the guy out, immobilizing him, but not killing him. Then he could have done what he wanted and left the cop without a witness (though it'd be obvious who'd done it).

But then, by harming Bowden -- whom he also tries to kill, and seems to briefly think he has killed, in the same way as the cop -- and his family, he's guaranteeing an almost certain murder conviction (or at least rape and assault, depending on what he actually managed to do). If he were truly afraid to go back to prison, he'd never do this stuff -- not in such an obvious way.

Or maybe he killed the cop, and would have killed the others, knowing that if caught, he'd get the death penalty -- and so not have to worry about going away for life "until he rots". Since at the end he tells Sam to shoot him, because he just doesn't "give a damn anymore", it seems that perhaps death doesn't worry him as much as being locked up forever. It's too bad this fear wasn't brought out and made more of during the film -- it would have made his more reckless actions understandable, and tense and credible to the audience...knowing that here was a man unafraid to die to get his revenge.

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[–] ecarle 12 years ago

I think we're all agreed that killing the cop is a major plot flaw in the film,

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I'm afraid we're not all agreed. I don't see it as a plot flaw. Telegonus knows I sometimes respectfully disagree. I hope you will cut me similar slack -- and you certainly don't have to accept my argument.

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By killing the cop, Max Cady reveals what we've spent the whole movie wondering: does he have the "ultimate level of evil" inside him? Is he willing to KILL?

Heretofore, he has been a sadistic abuser of women(and, on the evidence, a pretty good brawler with men -- I"ll bet he had some prison fights.) But his crusade of terror against the Bowden family is scrupulous in skipping homicide(well, he kills the family DOG, but the laws aren't too harsh against even such a sick crime.)

Anyway, we spend the movie wondering just how dangerous Max Cady is, and he finally reveals it: as dangerous as dangerous can be. A killer. Hell, I'd guess he killed before...we just weren't told about it.

He kills the cop so as to avoid making it look like a murder -- see, he would have fought THAT in court, too -- but WE see him as the murderer he is.

And I expect a nice circumtantial case could be made against Cady for THAT cop dying while protecting the Bowdens from Cady.

Note that when Cady attacks Mrs. Bowdwn on the boat, he's animalistic, but he's still "legalistic" -- he tells Mrs. Bowden he'll say she consented to this sex. When she says she'll testify otherwise("I won't be afraid to testify like the others!") -- he just keeps coming. I don't think legalities much stop Max Cady.

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but at first it wasn't clear to me that Cady had killed him. Initially it looks as though he's simply choking him to render him unconscious, not actually kill him. Only after he's finished, and shoves him off into the water (and utters that line about, "You're gonna die without a mark on you"), is it clear what he's doing. He'd have been better off knocking the guy out, immobilizing him, but not killing him. Then he could have done what he wanted and left the cop without a witness (though it'd be obvious who'd done it).

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I guess Mitchum's line was important to establish that the cop was dead...but it looked pretty fatal(and brutal) to me. And I don't much think Cady could bank on just knocking the cop out. People revive. (Like John Gavin in "Psycho" after Anthony Perkins first knocks him out.)

I guess I'm saying that for Max Cady to become a full-tilt movie villain...he had to become a killer. Norman Bates was a killer. Lars Thorwald was a killer. Bruno Anthony was a killer. Bob Rusk(in Hitchcock's Frenzy) was a rapist AND a killer (every time out, his m.o.) Robert Mitchum as the Preacher in Night of the Hunter was a killer.

And Cady was fully prepared to kill Sam Bowden, exactly the same way, thought he HAD killed Sam Bowden.

I think with regard to Cady's willingness to kill, the unknown issue remains "did he lose it?" or "did he plan it?"(Killing the cop, killing Bowden.) I'm guessing somewhere in between.

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Remake note: Whereas in the original, the cop who gets killed is a bit player with few lines(though he does take a meal with the Bowdens, yes?) in the remake, Telly Savalas' private eye becomes Joe Don Baker and he is guarding the Bowdens(at their home) and HE is killed by DeNiro's Cady. Earlier, Baker and DeNiro have an argument where Baker calls DeNiro "White Trash", and as DeNiro later kills Baker(in a hyber-bloody Scorsese killing, a strangling that goes awry so that Baker blows his own head off with his own gun) , DeNiro's Cady reveals animus towards his victim: "Who's White Trash, now?"

I prefer the quiet, cold cruelty of the cop's death in the original.


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But then, by harming Bowden -- whom he also tries to kill, and seems to briefly think he has killed, in the same way as the cop -- and his family, he's guaranteeing an almost certain murder conviction (or at least rape and assault, depending on what he actually managed to do). If he were truly afraid to go back to prison, he'd never do this stuff -- not in such an obvious way.

Or maybe he killed the cop, and would have killed the others, knowing that if caught, he'd get the death penalty -- and so not have to worry about going away for life "until he rots".

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We'll never know. What's clear is that Max Cady wants the cop's death to look accidental so he can claim it WAS accidental if he ends up in court over it.

I recently watched Denzel Washington play a crooked cop in his Oscar-winning turn in "Training Day." His clean young partner has seen Denzel do all sorts of criminal things -- he KNOWS Denzel is crooked -- and Denzel says:

"Its not what you know -- its what you can PROVE."

Max Cady could not have said it better.

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[–] hobnob53 12 years ago

ecarle -- of course I'll "cut you some slack"! Why? Did you think I wouldn't tolerate a disagreement?! Especially an honest, considered, civil one, such as yours.

But to clarify, what I mean when I say killing the cop was a plot mistake is that it's the first truly reckless step Cady has taken. Murdering the cop is stupid, and guarantees death if he's caught and convicted. Further, he couldn't have committed the murder without leaving any traces. Even with the forensic science of 1962, they could tell he'd been murdered. Cady killed the cop before pushing him into the water; therefore, there'd be no water in his lungs, which could happen only if he'd drowned. Also, his "You're gonna die without a mark on you" line may satisfy the audience, but it just doesn't happen that way. Choking the cop would unavoidably result in telltale marks on the man's throat and neck (purple patches where he'd grabbed him and so on), not to mention his crushed larynx and other damage. It is not possible to choke someone and leave no physical trace. So the very idea that he'd be able to get away with it by leaving no marks is false. This is not possible, and he'd be found out.

The whole point of this discussion is that Cady cannot both be scared of being locked away for life, yet risk not only the attacks on the Bowden family but murdering the policeman. These two aspects simply do not mesh. That's why I say one of two things is at work: either Cady isn't scared of being executed, only being imprisoned for life -- hence his willingness to kill -- and that if so, this should have been brought into the plot at some point so the audience would see how ruthless a man Cady is; or, it was a plot flaw. His recourse to legalisms (with the Mrs.) is doubly incongruous given his recklessness not only in attacking her, but in his even more serious actions.

These two sides of Cady's behavior simply cannot peacefully coexist in any logic. Basically, that's why I say there are plot problems here.

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[–] telegonus 12 years ago

Thank you for that, Hobnob. I'm not one who rigidly holds to opinions on things like films (values, morals, yes, and other, older arts forms). Movies are such a new medium, and they work at so many levels. Some are a joy to look at. I could watch Gone With the Wind, The Thief Of Baghdad, probably Duel In the Sun, certainly The Searchers, with the sound off, focusing as much on the color and images as the story. Yet some movies succeed or fail largely due to their writing. The better efforts of Joe Mankiewicz (A Letter To Three Wives, All About Eve, People Will Talk) work this way, as do most of Billy Wilder's films, though he often used collaborators. Double Indemnity, The Lost Weekend, Sunset Blvd and Some Like It Hot are all nice to look at but we don't watch those films for that so much as their stories, the characters, the actors and the writing. Film noir, a broad category, to say the least, can succeed as much "visuals" as story and characterization: ambiance, lighting, art direction, editing, music, the right looking actors in the right roles.

To stay on topic here: ECarle likes the cop killing in Cape Fear and we don't, but that's what makes a horse race. I know where he's coming, however his murder of the cop of literally overkill as I see it as Max Cady, especially thanks to Mitchum's playing of him, carries the threat of homicidality with him in every scene he's in, even when in faux passive or charming mode we know this guy's hard as nails; and the proof is in how well he manages to torment Bowden, stay out of harm's way where the law was concerned. Heck, all he had to do was to continue tormenting the basically mild and decent Bowden and he might have succeeded in driving the poor man and his wife and daughter to literal insanity. Imagine a Max Cady actually landing a job in Bowden's town, even as a Good Humor Man (i.e. ice cream vendor), anything, really, to stay busy, be around and about, tip his hat to the missus, say strange and vaguely threatening things to Boweden now and again without actually doing anything. If he could land a job, any job, do it well enough to pay his rent, he could have hung around for a year or more, doing his nasty without actually doing anything nasty and he'd be more than half-way to his goal of ruining Bowden's life.

Max Cady was patient but not patient enough. In the end he wanted to get back at Bowden in a way that would put himself at risk, needlessly, as I see it. He was actually doing a good job of rattling Bowden, driving him to desperate measures, and could have continued in this vein in a desultory fashion, on and off, for quite a long time. Just think of the possibilities of a law abiding Max Cady living in Bowden's community, doing nothing but minding his own business save for the occasional offhand, better still cryptic, word or two to Bowden or his wife. Cady as a cab driver, for instance, calling out "hey, counselor, need a lift?", and meaning it when Bowden was at the train depot. His mere presence would cast a huge shadow over the Bowden family. It might not "ruin" them but it would put them in a state of chronic fear. But then if Cady had been that cunning and subtle, willing to defer short term pleasure for his long term goal, it wouldn't make for such a good movie.

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[–] hobnob53 12 years ago

Nothing to thank me for, telegonus; it's a pleasure discussing these things with thoughtful, considerate and knowledgeable people such as you and ecarle. Besides, I don't think our disagreements are all that severe!

I just replied to E, so you may want to read what I said there (page 1 of this thread). I'll limit myself to two areas of comment here:

First, I like your choice of movies above, as well as your comments about them. I admire most of those films as well. (One tiny point: Billy Wilder always wrote in collaboration with one or two other people; he never wrote a solo screenplay. I think he needed another mind around to bounce things off of, and to stimulate his own creativity, and he himself said that, since English wasn't his first language, he always wanted a native speaker with him, someone who could readily pick up on anything that didn't sound quite right.)

Second, I want to tell you that your proposed alternate take on what Cady could have done to unsettle -- if not quite terrorize -- the Bowdens is genius, and I never use that word lightly. I especially like the notion of his becoming a Good Humor man (hey, I'm old enough to have fond memories of them, so no need to identify them as "ice cream vendors"! ). That truly is a perfect sort of cover from which to prey upon a family. I dislike so many people saying Cape Fear is Hitchcockian, but the idea of an evil Good Humor man is cynical enough -- and readily accessible to the audience of 1962 -- to have come from his often-warped mind.

That, and the other behavior you posit as possibilities for Cady, is nothing short of brilliant. I disgaree with you on only one thing -- I think that would have been as good, if not better, a movie.

That was a really enjoyable post! Well done.

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[–] telegonus 12 years ago

Thanks for the kind words, Hobnob. The idea just popped into my head. The problem with Cady doing what I suggested it that he wanted to get Bowden fast. He was patient enough for a few days, even weeks, but years! Highly unlikely. If I were Cady and had his personality I'd give Bowden the "eight long years" back with interest, live in the town for eight years, become a good citizen, or as good as I as Cady was capable of becoming, do some of the things I suggested (ice cream vendor, can driver), maybe move up in the world, but keep in Bowden's tail,--just to let him know that I know. That's eight years of tormenting someone without having to lift a finger: stroll by his house on the weekends, smile, make oddball small town with Bowden when able to do so; figure out when the wife does her shopping and where, do my shopping at the same time.

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[–] ecarle 12 years ago

To stay on topic here: ECarle likes the cop killing in Cape Fear and we don't, but that's what makes a horse race.

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There ya go...

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I know where he's coming, however his murder of the cop of literally overkill as I see it as Max Cady,

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I think there are other things in the arguments of hobnob and yourself on this thread to engage, so I will stop on my advocacy of the killing. One reaaches a point where the point is made, accepted or not.

To close it out(from my end, for now), perhaps what I meant to say is that whereas the logic of Max Cady doesn't allow for the cop killing, the logic of the American Studio Film Circa 1962 practically requires it. To be a Movie Villain, you gotta kill somebody(or order it, ala James Mason's spymaster in North by Northwest.)

'Nuff said. (From me.)

--- Heck, all he had to do was to continue tormenting the basically mild and decent Bowden and he might have succeeded in driving the poor man and his wife and daughter to literal insanity. Imagine a Max Cady actually landing a job in Bowden's town, even as a Good Humor Man (i.e. ice cream vendor), anything, really, to stay busy, be around and about, tip his hat to the missus, say strange and vaguely threatening things to Boweden now and again without actually doing anything. If he could land a job, any job, do it well enough to pay his rent, he could have hung around for a year or more, doing his nasty without actually doing anything nasty and he'd be more than half-way to his goal of ruining Bowden's life.

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The movie plays this way for about 1/3 of its running time, with Balsam's police chief unable to run Cady out of town on vagrancy(Cady has inherited cash to make a stake with) and Cady announcing to Bowden "I think maybe I'll settle down here."

Cady COULD make Bowden's life hell just by hanging around for a year or two and "being there."

But this is a movie -- a thriller -- and it really has to be a thriller at heart.

Indeed, I do believe Max Cady kills the family dog early in the plot...an announcement (to the Bowdens and the audience) that Cady is mean, cruel, ready to kill...at least animals. And Cady does this so early that we don't much figure he can "stay patient" for a whole year.

Note: there's another dog killer villain in movies -- Lars Thorwald in "Rear Window." I always figured Hitchcock had Lars kill that dog because he was so damn sympathetic -- Lars' wife looked rather shrewish, THAT killing evidently wasn't aggravating enough.

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Max Cady was patient but not patient enough. In the end he wanted to get back at Bowden in a way that would put himself at risk, needlessly, as I see it.

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Well, I think that was the point. Cady loses it. I'd like to believe he figured he could escape rather than facing jail/execution.

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It might not "ruin" them but it would put them in a state of chronic fear. But then if Cady had been that cunning and subtle, willing to defer short term pleasure for his long term goal, it wouldn't make for such a good movie.

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There's a movie called "Hombre" that had quite a thread going on its climactic scene, in which good guys led by Paul Newman are under siege in a mine shack by bad guys led by Richard Boone. Eventually, Newman comes out for a showdown with Boone and his gang. In "reality," perhaps Newman and his folks could have held out in that mine shack for DAYS before a confrontation was needed.

But then there would be no ending for the movie. So Boone ties a (very unsympathetic, near-villain) hostage woman to a stake in the sun, Newman comes out...the movie gets its climax.

"Cape Fear" is perhaps driven the same way. Max Cady COULD drive the Bowdens nuts for a coupla years...but the thriller demands refuse to take us there. We have to get "climaxes": Cady kills the dog, abuses Barrie Chase, beats up the thugs, etc.

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A "Psycho"-related thought:

I've posted at the "Psycho" board about a "wasn't filmed, couldn't BE filmed" sequence in that movie: whatever happened for the hour or so that Sam and Lila held Norman Bates captive in the fruit cellar until the Fairvale cops could drive out to the Bates Motel and arrest him. What did Sam and Lila DO with Norman? Did Norman stuggle, yell, fight for the whole hour? I doubt it -- I suspect he folded into physical stasis as "Mrs. Bates, stuffed figure." (The novel of Psycho avoided this problem by having Sam AND the local sheriff overcome Norman in the fruit cellar; the cop could cuff him on the spot.)

Well, we have a similar "wasn't filmed, couldn't BE filmed" near-end sequence in "Cape Fear":

Peck has the gun on Mitchum. Peck refuses to shoot Mitchum, gives him "you will rot" speech.

But now Mitchum and Peck have to sit together for...an hour? More? Mrs. Peck has to call the cops somehow(boat to shore radio?), and they have to take boats to the houseboat, etc. Did Mitchum just sit there calmly waiting for the cops to come to take him to rot? Did Mitchum and Peck have some conversation? Did Peck have to keep a good grip on the gun to keep Mitchum away from making a move?

The movie doesn't care. NO movie cares(at least Golden Era) about what happens "after the climax." Indeed, after the dramatic shot of Peck holding the gun on Mitchum(in long high shot), Mitchum disappears from the movie. We just get a shot of Peck and Family being driven on a fast boat out of Cape Fear.

One possible point: maybe Max Cady was all talk. To get shot by Peck, all Cady had to do was leap at the gun. Evidently Max Cady was too chicken.

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[–] telegonus 12 years ago

Fair enough, EC, and point well taken.

Cape Fear is a movie, and in order to work has to play to "movie logic", and does so brilliantly. My alternate "Cape Fear" would be a different sort of thriller,--a TV mini-series maybe--that would be spine tingling in a different way, but it would take a year or, as Cady put it to Bowden, maybe eight long years, and there wasn't enough time for that in a two hour running time. It had to wrap up, and did so efficiently, as commercial feature films must.

The Psycho analogy makes sense. Marion and Norman could have, indeed IRL time certainly would have spent much more time in the parlor chatting, but while you and I might love it all the more it would add an extra fifteen minutes or more to the film. Psycho, while not a "fast film" like they make today had to get where it needed to go quickly enough. Superficially, it does take its time, what with all of Marion's driving, the cop, the car purchase, yet in fact the brilliance of Stefano's script is that it telescopes events in such a way as to not linger too much over one thing. It doesn't dawdle, and yet it allows time for characters to snoop around and make small talk now and again, is so perfectly constructed that it's easy to not notice how perfectly made it really is, as we've discussed on several occasions. Cape Fear is more "basic instinct"-style, not so elegant in presentation, rough and ready where Psycho is smooth and seamless.

As an afterthought, and OT, given that this is a holiday and I've gotta go early this aft, I'd like to, as I've been watching old Peter Gunn episodes and enjoying them, revive an old thread on the show's message boards that actually goes back a few years but may not have the time today. It was a great series and yet it had its flaws, and like Psycho at its best it worked like a charm, with Gunn a sort of kinder, gentler Sam as a private eye, Jacoby as Arbogast as an actual policeman, Edie as the Lila-Marion figure, Mother as, no, not that mother a sort of benign Lowrey type character, plus a whole lot of eccentric minor characters, some semi-regulars, others not. I rather doubt it was a direct influence on Hitchcock or Psycho but indirectly, as a sort of landmark TV series, it helped pave the way for modern TV detective noir to evolve just as Psycho showed the way for modern horror to go.

I'll have to think on that before posting. Have a happy holiday, both you guys, EC and Hobnob...

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[–] ecarle 12 years ago


Thanks.

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Cape Fear is a movie, and in order to work has to play to "movie logic", and does so brilliantly. My alternate "Cape Fear" would be a different sort of thriller,--a TV mini-series maybe--that would be spine tingling in a different way, but it would take a year or, as Cady put it to Bowden, maybe eight long years, and there wasn't enough time for that in a two hour running time. It had to wrap up, and did so efficiently, as commercial feature films must.

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I don't want to discount your "alternate version," Telegonus. What we are talking about here is the difference between a "thriller" and a "suspense drama," or perhaps just a drama.

It seems to me that a story in which Cady threatens the Bowden family indirectly...while hanging around town and getting in Sam Bowden's face, for months or a year...would play out as a "problem drama" rather than a thriller. Key: Cady doesn't kill(dog, cop) or rape(Diane) anybody. Just reflects on what he HAS done and what he WILL do to Bowden.

Though some sympathy might be given to Cady's class status versus Bowden and the townspeople, the story might ultimately be: how much can a man abuse the law to torment "normal citizens." I can see the somewhat powerless characters of "Cape Fear"(Balsam's police chief, Telly's PI, maybe a new character or two -- a judge or the Mayor) marshalling the forces of society to bring Max Cady down as a matter of community decency. But no murders.

One of my definitions of a thriller is:

"A movie in which the villain and/or the hero, resort to homicide to advance their goals."

Many Hitchcocks come under this heading. Even in the "light" North by Northwest, James Mason orders murders, Valerian the knife man carries them out -- and Cary Grant ultimately must fight and kill Valerian(on Mount Rushmore) to save his OWN life.

Peck doesn't kill Mitchum in "Cape Fear," but Mitchum kills the dog and the cop and thus...its a thriller.

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The Psycho analogy makes sense. Marion and Norman could have, indeed IRL time certainly would have spent much more time in the parlor chatting, but while you and I might love it all the more it would add an extra fifteen minutes or more to the film. Psycho, while not a "fast film" like they make today had to get where it needed to go quickly enough. Superficially, it does take its time, what with all of Marion's driving, the cop, the car purchase, yet in fact the brilliance of Stefano's script is that it telescopes events in such a way as to not linger too much over one thing. It doesn't dawdle, and yet it allows time for characters to snoop around and make small talk now and again, is so perfectly constructed that it's easy to not notice how perfectly made it really is, as we've discussed on several occasions.

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Yep. I've had reason to watch a number of the movies Hitchcock made after "Psycho" recently and to a film, they seem to have lost the sense of "just right scene length" that "Psycho" has. "Marnie" especially allows its dialogue scenes to run on too long. The opening of Family Plot is disastrously overlong. "Frenzy" is the tightest of the bunch, but even there, Hitchcock seemed too willing to let the "Blaney and Babs" sequences go overboard on the expository dialogue.

In "Psycho," everything is timed just about perfectly. The only risk of overlength comes with our pal the shrink, and his "overlong" scene seems necessary to cover the ground.

I think the hardware store scene where Sam, Lila, and Arbogast meet should be taught everywhere for "so much in so little time"(the characters are drawn up and the plot advanced in record time).

The "organization" of Psycho is great, too. Hitchcock chooses when to slow down, when to speed up. The clean-up and burial of Marion Crane is about 7 minutes. Arbogast's? A single shot of Norman standing by the swamp -- we've seen it all before (though I think Arbo was harder to transport in girth and from the house.)

Arbogast's phone booth scene is pure exposition but WHAT exposition: his whole character justifies himself here. He found Marion at the Bates Motel. Now Lila knows. Now Lila will come. The plot has leaped ten paces forward.

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Cape Fear is more "basic instinct"-style, not so elegant in presentation, rough and ready where Psycho is smooth and seamless.

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Well...different makers. Hitchcock had something going on at his best, a "third eye" for where the camera goes and how it moves that few others knew how to achieve.

Moreover -- especially in "Psycho" -- Hitchcock made sure that his scripts had a certain structure and flow.

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As an afterthought, and OT, given that this is a holiday and I've gotta go early this aft, I'd like to, as I've been watching old Peter Gunn episodes and enjoying them, revive an old thread on the show's message boards that actually goes back a few years but may not have the time today. It was a great series and yet it had its flaws, and like Psycho at its best it worked like a charm, with Gunn a sort of kinder, gentler Sam as a private eye, Jacoby as Arbogast as an actual policeman, Edie as the Lila-Marion figure, Mother as, no, not that mother a sort of benign Lowrey type character, plus a whole lot of eccentric minor characters, some semi-regulars, others not. I rather doubt it was a direct influence on Hitchcock or Psycho but indirectly, as a sort of landmark TV series, it helped pave the way for modern TV detective noir to evolve just as Psycho showed the way for modern horror to go.

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There were a few PI shows on the air around the time Hitchcock made "Psycho," and I think that Peter Gunn was the "hottest," what with that supercool theme song and the Mancini music in general and the brutal cool of the show itself. (Notice how often Gunn solves a problem by killing it?)

I'd like to believe that Hitchcock saw an episode or two of "Peter Gunn"(which began in 1959) before he started work on "Psycho," if only to assist Joe Stefano in getting the Arbogast character set. Arbogast COULD have been cast with a handsome Craig Stevens type, that was the USUAL type of TV private eye(see also: 77 Sunset Strip.) But Sam Loomis is the handsome guy in Psycho, so Arbogast became...Herschel Bernardi. Sort of. (I suppose Bernardi may have been considered for Arbo...though I've read that Stefano himself made the Balsam recommendation right off the bat to Hitch.)

I also noticed watching the Peter Gunns that folks he talked to often eventually told him to get lost, saying something that Norman Bates softballed to Arbogast:

Norman: I think I've talked to you all I want to, Mr. Arbogast, and I think it would be much better if you left now.

On Peter Gunn, more like:

Suspect: Hey, listen! You aren't a cop, you aren't the police! I don't HAVE to talk to you. Get lost.

In any event, "Peter Gunn" was a great PI show prototype. It launched "Johnny Staccato" with John Cassavetes right away and led (indirectly) to suave Gene Barry as the whodunnit-solving-millionaire-cop on "Burke's Law," among other shows.

Its over on the Peter Gunn board that I listed it, but you should find the title of that one where Gunn has a fight to the death with that guy in the Medieval weapons room. A GREAT fight.

Happy Fourths were hopefully had by all. Its one of my favorites, summer and long days and picnics and fireworks and all.

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[–] hobnob53 12 years ago

It seems to me the nub of all this is just how "patient" -- which in this case, means just how truly clever -- Max Cady is.

We're led to believe through most of the movie that Cady is being very methodical in his actions. He's studied law, has taken care not to give the cops anything to hold him on (if not avoid being picked up altogether), commits crimes only against people who won't fight back (Diane) or by killing the dog, so that there's little chance of his being caught. Even near the end, when he's grabbed Mrs. B. and gives her that line about "with consent, there is no crime", he still seems to be clinging to walking that fine line between being caught and getting away with it, by the nature of his actions.

Yet in fact, even as outwardly we're still seeing Cady as a clever man who doesn't make mistakes (as even Mrs. Bowden tells him in that confrontation), behind the scenes, as it were, he's cracking. He doesn't have the wit or patience to go about his revenge in a truly methodical, clever way that would minimize his chances of being arrested and thrown back in jail. I think ecarle is precisely right on this aspect. His killing the policeman is the most obvious evidence of this. Had he been genuinely crafty and clever, and had the personality to be truly patient, he would never have put himself in such a position. It served no purpose and endangered him far more than all his other crimes put together.

His decison to assault Nancy is of the same problem. Unless he planned to kill her -- in which case he's not only risking the death penalty again but would be put in the position of having to kill her parents as well -- this crime makes no sense, at least if he expected to get away with it.

If he didn't care about going back to prison, or being killed, all these reckless crimes would make sense, but as I said, if this were the case, the movie should have brought this out from the start. As it is, we're led to believe he's too clever to get himself into such a situation, so that ultimately his crimes appear reckless and illogical, not clever, and certainly not actions that wouldn't result in his being locked up "until he rots"...if, indeed, not executed outright.

The fact that he couldn't contain himself even from assaulting Diane, or killing the dog, indicates early on that he's not as clever as we're led to think he is. His priorities are getting pretty skewed and putting his ultimate goal -- terrorizing and wreaking vengeance upon the Bowden family -- at grave risk. All this, at base, stems from his unstable personality.

So what we're left with is reconciling Cady's final exchange with Bowden -- asking to be killed, then acting like a trapped, frightened animal when Bowden tells him he's going away for life, in a cage -- with the kind of person we've been led to believe Cady is throughout the movie. His actions belie his seeming thoroughness and cleverness, and his final words show that, like any bully, he cannot face the consequences of his acts. But that's not the Cady we've been led to see through most of the film.

As to ecarle's question about how the Bowdens held Cady long enough to call in the police, well, as he says, that's part and parcel of lots of movies, where resolutions are often hurried and skip over some mundane details. Personally, I think Cady could easily have made a break for it, or lunged at Bowden to get the gun, with some prospect of success. (And if he really wanted Bowden to shoot him, why not try to escape? Worst case scenario is that he gets shot anyway.) It's another little nagging issue that people like us can haggle about, 50 years on. I'm sure Greg Peck, the film's producer, planned it that way.

Hope you guys are enjoying a happy 4th of July. Wonderful occasion to reflect on our nation's anniversary , its tradition of civil liberties , our justice system , and prison life .

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[–] ecarle 12 years ago

Even near the end, when he's grabbed Mrs. B. and gives her that line about "with consent, there is no crime", he still seems to be clinging to walking that fine line between being caught and getting away with it, by the nature of his actions.

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Yes, he is. And he says to the (dead) cop: "They won't find a mark on you." (Plus the inexplicable but darkly funny: "Yuh just got too big for yuh britches.") Cady is still banking on being "legalistic" and beating the rap but...he's also gone some kind of crazy and his legal ideas may not be holding water anymore(Mrs. Bowden says she WILL testify that he raped her.)

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Yet in fact, even as outwardly we're still seeing Cady as a clever man who doesn't make mistakes (as even Mrs. Bowden tells him in that confrontation),

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She's trying to reason with his "legalistic" side but meeting "the animal within."

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behind the scenes, as it were, he's cracking. He doesn't have the wit or patience to go about his revenge in a truly methodical, clever way that would minimize his chances of being arrested and thrown back in jail. I think ecarle is precisely right on this aspect. His killing the policeman is the most obvious evidence of this. Had he been genuinely crafty and clever, and had the personality to be truly patient, he would never have put himself in such a position. It served no purpose and endangered him far more than all his other crimes put together.

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Yes, I think so. Killing the cop was the point of no return. But: he HAD to kill the cop to get to his ultimate goal: Bowden's women. He was "hungry."

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His decison to assault Nancy is of the same problem. Unless he planned to kill her -- in which case he's not only risking the death penalty again but would be put in the position of having to kill her parents as well -- this crime makes no sense, at least if he expected to get away with it.

If he didn't care about going back to prison, or being killed, all these reckless crimes would make sense, but as I said, if this were the case, the movie should have brought this out from the start. As it is, we're led to believe he's too clever to get himself into such a situation, so that ultimately his crimes appear reckless and illogical, not clever, and certainly not actions that wouldn't result in his being locked up "until he rots"...if, indeed, not executed outright.

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My one repeated remark here is that maybe Cady's plan was to kill whoever he needed to kill -- the cop, Peck, either or both of the women -- and RUN. He knows how to get around. Mexico or the Carribean or possible hiding places. There are hundreds of islands down there.

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So what we're left with is reconciling Cady's final exchange with Bowden -- asking to be killed, then acting like a trapped, frightened animal when Bowden tells him he's going away for life, in a cage -- with the kind of person we've been led to believe Cady is throughout the movie. His actions belie his seeming thoroughness and cleverness, and his final words show that, like any bully, he cannot face the consequences of his acts. But that's not the Cady we've been led to see through most of the film.

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Its a bit "1962," but we do have the image of Mitchum starting to charge at Peck when Peck refuses to shoot him...but then backing off. Like any bully...he folds.

Well, he didn't fold with those thugs...but then he got the upper hand on THEM. And he attacked the cop...and Bowden...from behind.

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[–] telegonus 12 years ago

It was a great holiday, Hobnob . I hope yours went as well. Everything went as planned. The weather was perfect, various family members in good chear, my aunt and uncle, both well past ninety, in good spirits, or as good as one's spirits can be at that age. The food was out of this world.

I think you nailed it as to Cady's mental state. He was at the core an unstable personality, hence his his lifestyle, his violent ways--though one can be just as unstable and be kind and gentle--thus his actions were an attempt to cover for his inability to control his emotions, which gave the sort of "false positive" of his being a control freak. Bowden had "outed" him for the violent, mercurial individual he was by testifying against him and Cady sought to get back at the basically stable Bowden by controlling and tormenting him.

Cady's fly in the ointment was that while he could torture Bowden by attempting to out-control him this could go only so far. My scenario of a Cady tormenting Bowden for weeks, months, maybe years on end, would require a change in the character structure of Max Cady. His poisoning of the dog, his beating up the bar girl and even his beating the three thugs in a fight only goes to show that while Cady could be cruel he in each case overstepped the bounds of his own game plan while "having some fun" as he prepared to zero in on Bowden and his wife and child.

In each case his behavior showed a basic irrationality, an instabilty, not cleverness. Anyone can poison a dog and get away with it. The abuse of the woman he picked up was more serious, but she was in a morally ambiguous position (for the time) by going off and having sex with a man she met in a bar, even going to far as to call him out on his innate sleaziness while they were driving to her lodgings. In the eyes of many moviegoers of 1962 she was all but "asking for it". She called him "rock bottom" and he proved to be just that. The three thugs who went after Cady were, well, three thugs. Cady proved more thuggish (good for him). though if he'd allowed them to rough him up just enough he might have been able to have got his lawyer to connect the dots between the thugs and Bowden. In this case maybe he just didn't have enough time to think, though given how he was behaving he should have expected something like that might happen.

Max Cady had too much of the wild beast in him to remain in cool mode for long. He pulled it off in town yet even then he was up to something much more insidious, which, if he'd been merely hinting, giving Bowden a hard time, as I suggested he might have done in my alternate scenario, he wouldn't have been planning the "next logical step". Nor was he clever enough, and one argue that this is a flaw in the script (and maybe book) to realize that the trip up river on the houseboat was an attempt to lure him into a trap. Heck, he knew a private detective had been following him, lost him, but still, this might have given him a wake-up call that there was a good chance that Bowden or someone else was on or nearby the houseboat, armed and dangerous.

In other words, Cady should have expected that Bowden, no dummy, was going to turn the tables on him sooner or later, and the houseboat was the best way to do it. But "should have" assumes a stable personality, someone who can think straight and keep thinking straight for long periods. Cady was capable of this for only relatively short periods, and eventually it was the elaborate nature of the trap Bowden set for him that did him in. Cady got so caught up in the logistics of getting there, on the houseboat, to the wife and daughter; he forgot to put the matter in perspective. Even with the cop on the shore he disposed of so neatly it might have occurred to him that things was going too smoothly; but again, this requires stability, the ability to draw back and think things out clearly.



While watching the fireworks the other night I couldn't help but think what a fortunate country we are, yet my warm feelings were mixed with some concern. How long can we keep this up? We're a nation of laws, a nation that believes in justice and fairness for all, and we all know that in the natural course of life a significant portion of the population is treated unfairly, gets a raw deal, or deals,--socially, economically, emotionally--and that the law can sometimes be worse than the criminals. It sometimes feels that the Founder set such high standards we'll never be able to live up to them; and not because the Founders were wrong but due to our being so flawed. Not Americans, per se I mean human beings, as a species.

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[–] ecarle 12 years ago

In other words, Cady should have expected that Bowden, no dummy, was going to turn the tables on him sooner or later, and the houseboat was the best way to do it. But "should have" assumes a stable personality, someone who can think straight and keep thinking straight for long periods. Cady was capable of this for only relatively short periods, and eventually it was the elaborate nature of the trap Bowden set for him that did him in.

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"Capable of this for only short periods." That's right on. Cady has jailhouse legal smarts, but we know he's an animal at heart. Just the fact that Bowden discovered him sexually attacking a woman OUTDOORS(in a city alley) suggests Cady's uncontrollable nature.

Scorsese's 1991 remake has a lot of "R"-rated graphicness that was "unnecessary but unavoidable in the 90s," and one thing that Scorsese's Cady (Robert DeNiro) tells Bowden(Nick Nolte) is that for many years of his prison time, he was forcibly raped by larger and even more powerful male inmates. Cady thus comes out of prison in a fury, "no longer a human being" to his own mind -- and also, as "a woman"(in prison terms). Mitchum gives us no such sexually gruesome back story...but perhaps it is suggested in his rage against Peck's Bowden.

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Cady got so caught up in the logistics of getting there, on the houseboat, to the wife and daughter; he forgot to put the matter in perspective. Even with the cop on the shore he disposed of so neatly it might have occurred to him that things was going too smoothly; but again, this requires stability, the ability to draw back and think things out clearly.

All gone by then.

Absolutely ridiculous in the remake, btw: Cady tracks the Bowdens to Cape Fear in a silly way: tied underneath their car for the whole trip down Southern highways! The scene where he unties himself and walks into a gas station to wash up(he is covered in soot and grease) was spoofed by one of those comedy movies, showing "Cady" on fire with his clothes ripped off in the back. In real life, I figure one speed bump, and Cady's back would break immediately.

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While watching the fireworks the other night I couldn't help but think what a fortunate country we are, yet my warm feelings were mixed with some concern. How long can we keep this up? We're a nation of laws, a nation that believes in justice and fairness for all, and we all know that in the natural course of life a significant portion of the population is treated unfairly, gets a raw deal, or deals,--socially, economically, emotionally--and that the law can sometimes be worse than the criminals. It sometimes feels that the Founder set such high standards we'll never be able to live up to them; and not because the Founders were wrong but due to our being so flawed. Not Americans, per se I mean human beings, as a species.

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I'm glad you had a good holiday. As I say, I like it for its summer relaxation. We're all entitled to relax a bit.

As for America itself, I dunno. Its a country huge enough and populous enough that no one opinion can hold sway; hardly mine. The Founding Fathers set it up as a place to come to, a place of specified freedoms...but over 200plus years, the "human factors" have certainly added injustice and corruption to the mix.

The law in actual courtroom practice can be a very creepy thing, practiced by very scary people(I am speaking of lawyers, who are educated and trained and yet still, in my experience, come to lack some humanity -- they aren't "fun" off-duty.)

"Cape Fear"(both versions) shows how American laws can be used by the predatory criminal in his favor --its a backhanded compliment to our legal protections. But (both versions) also say: sometimes we make our own laws.

I open the daily paper and notice that in certain America neighborhoods, the law isn't holding. Depleted police forces are allowing criminals to grow more bold; gang societies create their own laws...and they are very merciless. There are a lot of murders. But only in some places.

Hitchcock addressed this back in the 60's when he introduced a TV series package of his shows, saying something(written by James Allardice) like this: "I am here to talk about murders. Oh, not those awful amateur murders that are splashed all over the newspapers, those are in such poor taste." He was saying that "real" murder is a terrible, banal, sad thing, the mark of social conditions and family breakdown. Meawnhile, "Hitchcock murders" were t things of style and fantasy and delicious shock.

Anyway, all these "dark sides" to American life, and yet a lot of good, too. A lot of lives being lived just fine. I figure the nation will survive, but it will change so markedly(after I die) that I wouldn't recognize it if I were able to come back to visit. The racial make-up of the nation alone is changing markedly everyday. I intend no racist comment in saying it will be "different" -- but it WILL be different. And the Founding Father's laws will be expected to run that New World with different people, many speaking different languages. I expect more harmony than conflict among these peoples.

My hopes are also raised by all the pregnant young women I see, all the little toddlers and kids. Human beings are driven to bring children into the world because "they see a future beyond themselves." Its a nice thought...and a basic drive that is far older than the US Constitution.

We'll make it. But it will never be perfect. You know who understood that? Alfred Hitchcock. In practically every movie he ever made.

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[–] telegonus 12 years ago

Did I write Founder, EC? I meant Founders.

Max Cady was, to engage in a little psychobabble, a likely PTSD case, first having it done to him, then doing it to others; and the vicious circle just continued. It's obviously more complicated than that, especially if you're Max Cady, but that's probably in a nutshell what was going on. If so, he'd be incapable of thinking clearly since humiliating other people, whether sexually or psychologically, is his main goal in life, and had long since become an addiction by the time Bowden saw him molesting the woman up in Baltimore. Of course the real life of Max Cady would be a different movie, and one might even feel bad for him, assuming my hypothesis is correct.

On the other hand, and I've just finished reading a book on the Devil in which the author quotes at the end various psychiatrists who had spent much of thir professional lives dealing with psychopaths in prisons, and many claimed to actually believe in the reality of evil, not the devil but of evil embedded in the human spirit, as there are people who possess no morality or conscience whatsoever and who, so far as the "experts" can tell have not been "made that way" due to traumatic upbringings but who were born that way. Charles Manson may fit the bill, though he had a rough time of it growing up.

As to the future of our country, I go back and forth, like a manic-depressive (which, for the record, I'm not), with things looking dreadful some of the time, literally unfixable, feeling that we're juggernauting toward the precipice and there's no stopping it,--we're all going to fall into the ravine; and then there are times when I think of all the progress humans have made, how many diseases have been cured, of the evolution of our species as something that's taken millions of years, and I realize we're a work in progress, not something graven in stone, and I don't feel so bad. Also, medical science is speeding up our biological evolution in all kinds of nifty (and maybe not so nifty) ways, so if we survive this century we may be able to develop more fully biologically and, I hope, spiritually. Wishful thinking? Maybe, but then nearly all the good things that ever came to pass in the this world began that way: as dreams, wishes, hopes.

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[–] ecarle 12 years ago

Did I write Founder, EC? I meant Founders.

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No, I think I did. Editing problems.

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Max Cady was, to engage in a little psychobabble, a likely PTSD case, first having it done to him, then doing it to others; and the vicious circle just continued.

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The remake is far too explicit about this...with Cady telling Bowden of his abuse in prison. (A disturbing sidelight to that memory: perhaps Cady might avenge himself sexually not only on Bowden's women, but on...Bowden? Neither movie goes there.)

Neither film speaks to Cady's childhood, but I expect it was horrific. He's a psycho made not born...or a psycho made MORE psycho by his upbringing. I guess.

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It's obviously more complicated than that, especially if you're Max Cady, but that's probably in a nutshell what was going on. If so, he'd be incapable of thinking clearly since humiliating other people, whether sexually or psychologically, is his main goal in life, and had long since become an addiction by the time Bowden saw him molesting the woman up in Baltimore. Of course the real life of Max Cady would be a different movie, and one might even feel bad for him, assuming my hypothesis is correct.

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My guess is we WOULD feel bad for Max Cady in childhood...unless he was a Bad Seed. A horrible monster raised by nice people. Doubtful.

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On the other hand, and I've just finished reading a book on the Devil in which the author quotes at the end various psychiatrists who had spent much of thir professional lives dealing with psychopaths in prisons, and many claimed to actually believe in the reality of evil, not the devil but of evil embedded in the human spirit, as there are people who possess no morality or conscience whatsoever and who, so far as the "experts" can tell have not been "made that way" due to traumatic upbringings but who were born that way. Charles Manson may fit the bill, though he had a rough time of it growing up.

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I've read up on this myself and shrinks do sort of hit a brick wall trying to "explain" homicidal psychopaths. It boils down sometimes to "brain chemistry" , which COULD = "evil by another name." The lead teenage "Columbine" killer got good grades, took girls to the Prom, had a job at a pizza parlor. But he really, really, REALLY wanted to kill people. And he did.

One thing experts on homicidal psychos have said is: they are all psycho from birth, but a brutal/criminal upbringing just brings it to the surface sooner.

A psycho raised in a nice home is a "bad seed," maybe just gonna be a really mean person, not a killer.

I think I"ve met some of THOSE people...

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As to the future of our country, I go back and forth, like a manic-depressive (which, for the record, I'm not), with things looking dreadful some of the time, literally unfixable, feeling that we're juggernauting toward the precipice and there's no stopping it,--we're all going to fall into the ravine; and then there are times when I think of all the progress humans have made, how many diseases have been cured, of the evolution of our species as something that's taken millions of years, and I realize we're a work in progress, not something graven in stone, and I don't feel so bad. Also, medical science is speeding up our biological evolution in all kinds of nifty (and maybe not so nifty) ways, so if we survive this century we may be able to develop more fully biologically and, I hope, spiritually. Wishful thinking? Maybe, but then nearly all the good things that ever came to pass in the this world began that way: as dreams, wishes, hopes.

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Well, its worthwhile to ponder these things, to be sure. I have lived to see the world change "physically" for the worse. Where once were open fields and isolated coastal communites now are overcrowded with housing and traffic -- but its just people who want "some room for their own, a piece of the good life". Some older neighborhoods are given over to crime and danger. The culture itself(TV, films) seems to be "dumber"(in some places, not all.)

But we're talking 300 million plus people in America, billions all over the world --"more good guys than bad guys."

I've found great pleasure living life at a lower level of income and fame than those I read about. Irony: a lot of us may be "educated enough" to write all sorts of things about movie stars and movie directors, but we will end our lives earning about 1/99th that they did. Or less. (I've read that, adjusted for inflation, Hitchcock made about $150 million PERSONALLY from "Psycho.") No matter. OUR lives are enriched watching, remembering, thinking about, writing about, THEIR work.

Or At least enjoying it.

Here's to the US lasting as a home for people like us, everywhere.

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[–] ecarle 12 years ago

All this aside, any jury would likely disbelieve an insanity claim and convict Cady of first-degree murder, simply because of the heinous nature of the crime, not to mention Cady's evil, unrepentant persona.

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That happens. Any number of killers probably WERE insane but got put in prison anyway. Jury's can be tough about their scruples.

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I never saw that Hitchcock TV episode you two talked about. Sounds good, and I'll try to keep an eye out for it on cable.

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The hour longs are currently on at night on the Encore Suspense Channel on cable.

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[–] ecarle 12 years ago

Yes, Jimmy Stewart's character made no bones about where he stood where the two young killers were concerned in Rope .

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Nor does the film! Later Hitchcock would simply have Norman Bates put away "probably for all time."

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As was so often the case with Stewart in films, increasingly as time went on, he was full of rage, guilt, ambivilence and loathing, to varying degrees, depending on the situation.

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I like "Rope" a great deal, first for the sheer damn daring of the stunt itself(unlike other filmmakers, Hitchcock often DID what he said he mused about doing in a movie), second for the cruel power of the "debate" in the film: lessers can be killed by their superiors? Stewart's character jokes about it, and his rage at the end that the "boys" acted on reflects some real self-loathing, extremely well communicated by Stewart, because he knew how to do that.

Farley Granger was direct about James Stewart in Rope, having worked with him on it: "It was clear that Jimmy was increasingly upset to realize that he was playing a heavy in the picture." Well, yes and no...but there's certainly some "yes" there. Stewart was always willing to give Hitchcock his "dark side." The heroes of Rope, Rear Window and Vertigo aren't very heroic, and even the dad in "Man Who Knew Too Much" is pretty ornery.

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There's no doubt where he stands in his first Hitchcock film. Yet two years later he was as serene as could be as Elwood P. Dowd in Harvey, and the cupola of the Dowd house, as we both knoew, was (fittingly?) used for the Bates house on the hill ten years later.

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Harvey 1950
Psycho 1960

an oddly matched pair a decade apart. Parts of the Psycho house AND Fairvale appear in "Harvey," and they lasted a decade to be used again. There's nothing horrific in "Harvey" but it is about a possible madman with an imaginary friend(no, wait! Harvey turns out to be real!)

With all his raging men on either side of it, Stewart is an oasis of serenity in "Harvey." Whether Harvey is real or not, I think Stewart is giving us a portrait of a man divorced from reality("I've been wrestling with reality for 20 years, and I'm pleased to say I've won.") One critic wrote that Dowd "has no desire" -- for marriage, for sex, for fame, for fortune. The guy's got family money(like Norman Bates)...he just likes to drink and pontificate.

I read a James Stewart biography with a funny story about how he had emergency dental work and the dentist doubled the tortue by telling Stewart how wrong he had played Dowd versus the non-star actor(Frank Fay) who did it on Broadway...and who was briefly replaced BY Stewart on Broadway.

Me, I love "Harvey." And I really love Stewart's long monologue in the back alley about how he met Harvey and his troubled life got all better...


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Yet in Anatomy Of a Murder, Stewart seems well at ease and very folksy, fishing up in Michigan, living all by himself, sort of like Norman Bates with no issues and a law degrees. He's shrewd and unflappable in his professional conduct, seems to know what he's doing at all times. I think of the TV Perry Mason, in which Perry is often admonished by the judge for "going on a fishing expedition". In Anatomy Of a Murder Stewart's lawyer does just that, and then some. In the end he doesn't get paid for his efforts, a not ironic conclusion to the film given the nature of the man he was defending and his wife.

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That's a great role for Stewart, his final Oscar nomination(and he was certainly better than 1959 winner Charlton Heston, though that's the year Cary Grant SHOULD have been nominated and won for "The Perfect Cary Grant Performance" in North by Northwest. Too comical? Try John Wayne's win for "True Grit.")

The "living all by himself" aspect of the Stewart character has always been intersting to me. He's what we used to call "a confirmed bachelor." Gay isn't part of it(though he does say that he "loves" his good drunk-lawyer friend Arthur O'Connell); he just seems to be a loner.

That Stewart doesn't get paid for his efforts at the end reflects -- to me -- that folksy old Jimmy is playing a rather reprehensible kind of lawyer at times: a lawyer who will do anything, say anything to get his client off. The film brilliantly refuses to tell us just how bad client Gazzara WAS(he clearly killed the victim, but for good reason? And was he "temporarily insane"?), Stewart doesn't want to know and tears up some good people on the witness stand in defending Gazzara. ("I was just doin' my job," he tells one victim of his cross-examination later.) And he gets him off on..temporary insanity. "Irresistable impulse."

And so he doesn't get paid. Gazzara, using his legal defense writes "We took off...I had an irresistable impulse."

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One can see in these later Stewart films why he was such a superstar and why Fonda was not. Picture Fonda in Rope. Maybe, but would he have had Stewart's "moral passion". Or in Harvey. No whimsy, no "otherworldly" qualities, which Stewart, oddly, had, and which Fonda, equally inner directed, didn't have. Fonda would likely have played the lawyer in Anatomy Of a Murder with the low key moral fervor he brought to his juror character in 12 Angry Men, but would there be the laughs, the funny stuff, with Eve Arden, the judge, George C. Scott's hotshot prosecutor? I doubt it.

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Henry Fonda has so many Old Hollywood movies I'll never live to see them all, but of what I HAVE seen, I'd say, in brief: he was more handsome than James Stewart, but far less emotionally connected to his audience. It is illuminating that on two great occasions -- The Wrong Man and 12 Angry Men right after it -- Fonda WAS (finally) emotional...but not like James Stewart would be/could be.

I know that I can be instructed on Fonda in "The Lady Eve" and as Abe Lincoln, but I can just go with what I know. And Fonda's career rather self-destructed. You can find him with third billing behind Natalie Wood and Tony Curtis in "Sex and the Single Girl"(paid much less than them, I've read)...and he's hardly in the movie. Fonda played a lot of "star cameos" in his last decade..and then of course saved himself with the rather prefab old guy in "On Golden Pond" that finally got him an Oscar.

Here's something: Henry Fonda played Wyatt Earp well in John Ford's "Gunfight at the OK Corral" picture -- "My Darling Clementine." Victor Mature played Earp's consumptive gunslinger pal Doc Holliday. But Fox wanted John Ford to cast JAMES STEWART as Doc Holliday.

A huge missed opportunity, I say. Doc Holliday is just about the most foolproof great role in Westerns. He's sick, he's dying, he's a dentist, he's a gambler, he's a killer, he has a hooker girlfriend...and he's the best friend Wyatt Earp ever had. Val Kilmer(opposite Kurt Russell as Earp) has given us the greatest Doc Holliday, but Kirk Douglas did a great take on him, too(oppposite pal Burt Lancaster). Dennis Quaid literally starved himself to play the role opposite Kevin Costner as Earp, and Jason Robards was fine opposite James Garner as Earp.

But James Stewart would have been something to see in that role, I think. Especially with pal Fonda.

Ford cast Victor Mature, he said, " because Mature looks like Doc Holliday." And you know what? Victor Mature as Doc Holliday was great too.

The role is foolproof!

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Yes, the Inger Stevens episode, Forecast: Low Clouds and Coastal Fog was one of the best if not the best of the more dramatic entries in the hour long Hitchcock series. Stevens was superb,--and what a Hitchcoch gal she might have been!--and the supporting players were all well cast. The "noose tightening" in the second half, when it looks like Stevens may be the potential victim of a total stranger, then Dan O'Herlihy's heavy drinking, seemingly potentially unstable writer turns up, then the Hispanic guy whose wife had just died, with the X factor,--who's really going after Stevens?--left open, creates nearly unbearable tension, more so for Miss Stevens' extremely sympathetic playing of the lead. I had eliminated O'Herlihy and the enraged Hispanic guy as too obvious; red herrings, in other words. The clean-cut beach boys seemed the best bet, and I was right.

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This episode is good in so many ways. One treat of my watching these Hitchcock episodes is that its like it would have been to see "Psycho" WITHOUT knowing about the shower scene or the twist ending. I literally have no idea where these hour long shows are going to go...and the good guys CAN get killed as long as Hitch comes on at the end and tells us the cops got the bad guys.

Inger Stevens is very good in the part...better I think than Tippi Hedren would have been. Oh, well.

Interesting to me: her wealthy husband has left her alone in the house, and he grumpily but loyally returns from San Francisco to comfort her. And we see: he's a pretty old guy. Oh, its THAT kind of marriage. Once we see that old-guy husband, all the other males become more "sexually magnetic," especially those two-out-of-three hunky surfer guys, but also the writer, and in some ways, the Hispanic(Latino? I don't know.) And then the old husband LEAVES AGAIN. Very weird dynamic. (He clearly doesn't like his wife surfing with the handsome guys...does she "get hers?")

The revelation of the three surfer guys as "group psychos" is interesting to me. On one hand, it seems terribly contrived: how did three surfer guys come to find a shared delight in attacking women?

And then I thought about it? Maybe those three met SOMEWHERE ELSE. Prison, maybe. Or in a gang. And over time, they learned that they liked attacking women and decided to "hang out as surfers" -- an easy way to stalk pretty prey while not being suspected.

Interesting to me, at least. A very good episode all the way around, suspenseful, hard to predict. Sexually complex.

Richard Jaekel had his own fame, but of interest with the two other young psychos:

Chris Robinson: handsome enough but not gorgeous, this guy got a lot of TV work but it never quite panned out for him.

Peter Brown: An interesting actor to me. He has that kind of "beautiful boy next door" handsomeness that practically guaranteed a TV career for him, but seemed to have the looks for movies.

Around 1965, Universal put Peter Brown in an action Western about four Professionals-type Texas Rangers called "Laredo." The four were well cast: Grizzled Neville Brand as the tough-guy comic relief(Brand was a WWII hero in real life and the "name" on the show); Peter Brown as the cutie-pie young ranger; muscleman William Smith as the muscleman young ranger; and Philip Carey(then the macho "Granny Goose") as their boss, "Captain Parmalee."

"Laredo" is in reruns on Encore and its a sweet memory. Peter Brown and William Smith got minimal "launch" from the show, but where they ended up was weird: as the white villains in 70's blaxploitation movies. I was never sure why "Laredo" led to THAT for them. The muscular Smith had a bigger career, with two major movie fight scenes to his name: one with Rod Taylor in "Darker Than Amber" (1970) and a much more famous one with Clint Eastwood in one of those orangatan movies.

A digression, I know: but seeing Peter Brown in that Hitchcock reminded me of a handsome young actor who maybe should have been a bigger star, IMHO. And William Smith DID become a "cult" star. He looked frickin' DANGEROUS.

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Okay, now to bring this back to Cape Fear and the insanity of killers, I think that this is often the case in films that are thrillers, the ones that end with a murder. Hitchcock often emphasized the mental unbalance or eccentricities of his murderers, with Rear Window's Lars Thorwald sticking out like a sore thumb, as he comes across as less insane than forlorn, a man at the end of his rope (pun intended), and as such more to be pitied as loathed, and this is emphasized, even when we can't even see him, just listening to him from behind the door as he speaks about having no money.

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Practically ALL criminality has an element of mental illness to it. Whether you are robbing banks or cheating people out of their life savings, a certain "lack of empathy" comes in. (It has been noted that Bernie Madoff, in ruining the investments of many rich, older people...did it partially with a serial killer's desire to HURT THEM and experience pleasure from it.) But the law decided centuries ago to treat most criminal enterprise as "sane."

I think the legal definition with most weight about insanity is "not knowing right from wrong," or something like that. Ironically, killers who kill "just to kill"(think Norman Bates or Bob Rusk in Frenzy) are more likely to be found insane. A Mafia hitman, or a guy who murders his wife for the insurance money...sane.

Mafia movies from "The Godfather" to "GoodFellas" to "The Sopranos" play like horror movies to me because...these guys are monsters. They base their business on, at a minimum, beating people up(to make them pay) and at a maximum, to kill them "just like that." Murder and torture are their business practices. And they enjoy their work. And they dismember victims with no compunction at all.

Lars Thorwald is a special case because of his willingness to dismember his wife's body and move her body parts all over town. Does such depravity = insanity? Or sheer desperation?(Too many witnesses in that apartment complex to carry a whold body out.)

His final pleas to Jeff sound like the pleas of a sad, desperate, hounded man.

I think he would have been executed. New York still had the death penalty back then.



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In Cape Fear there's not an ounce of synpathy for Max Cady,--well, maybe an ounce, when he talks about how his wife left him, but then he goes and spoils it by telling us what he did to her afterward--so he's just a monster, Lucifer dressed up as a human being.

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Exactly. Same with the class issues you have well raised. The movie probably didn't want the audience TOO sympathetic with Cady's economic plight. He's a monster, a sadist...when he talks to Peck about what he did to the wife, he snarls "I want you to hear this": (a) Because he blames Peck for it happening(sending him to prison) and (b) Because he's a sadist, enjoying a review of his crime.

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There is another aspect to Peck telling Cady "he will rot": The 1962 movie is confronting very directly that Peck has the gun, Peck has the drop on Cady, Cady is ASKING to be killed(or rather, he says "I just don't care")...so wouldn't you or I just shoot the bastard and claim self-defense later?

Maybe, maybe not. But Greg "Atticus Finch" won't. So part of his "you will rot in jail" speech is Peck saying "Because I'm not going to execute you here and now."

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In the remake, Bowden is TRYING to kill Cady in the swamp, raging like a primal caveman and trying to smash Cady's head with a big rock, but it is a crazy scene and "fate intervense"(Cady is entangled in the boat and drowns) so the issue is moot.

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As you pointed out, EC, these matters differ by state, and one can help but think that the Georgia of 1962 would have been stricter, less flexible, than most states further north or west. On the other hand, Bowden was a "leading citizen", surely had friends in high places, so he might have finessed Cady's life sentence, with or without insanity as an issue. It would probably been crueller and more just to send him to an instituion for the criminally insane rather than one for the sane, as this would have been the supreme insult to Cady's ego. With the criminally sane he'd be, in his mind, at least "among equals", while if surrounded by madmen he'd be in with the loonies, which would make every day living hell, due as much to be associated with his social "inferiors" as to the lock-up itself.

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All worth contemplating. I might add that while the South has a strict reputation, this 1962 movie is at pains to show "the law" acting with proper discretion(Balsam's police chief, Kruschen's defense lawyer, etc.) The story is about how Cady's animal cunning will be met with...the banal bureaucracy of a just legal system.



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